IPv6

Maintstream IPv6 is inching closer

Over the last year I’ve written about the importance of developing your IPv6 skills now, and about how you should be looking at what kind of IPv6 support your vendors of choice have to offer. Some of you might think I’m being a Chicken Little by devoting any space to the advance of IPv6. IPv4 is the dominant version of Internet Protocol and widespread use of IPv6 is still years off, most of you say. Most of the networking pros and many of the vendors whom I talk to say its not something worth thinking about right now. There is plenty else to worry about.

Indeed, you may react to an IPv6 story or tip like I react to those commercials I’ve been seeing about the transition from analog to digital television broadcasts scheduled for February. “Upgrade your TVs today because in February TV stations will cease to broadcast analog signals. Yes, this means YOU, you folks who don’t have cable or satellite television. Vast multidues of you will be unable to watch NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX and PBS unless you buy a new TV or get a digital converter box… Or you could just get cable.”

Yes, I usually flip the channel when I see those commercials. If you’re reading this blog, it’s likely that you aren’t one of the 7.8 million Americans who will be affected by the end of analog TV, either. But chances are good that you should be paying attention to IPv6 because it is getting closer.

In a new research note entitled IPv4 Address Exhaustion: An Inconvenient Truth (client log-in required), analyst Jeff Young predicts that IPv4 addresses will run out in November 2011. That’s less than two years away. And you don’t want to wait until then to start planning for a transition. IPv4 addresses could start getting pricey. There is still no backwards compatibility between IPv4 and IPv6, which means that when IPv6-only hosts start cropping up on the Internet in a couple years, there could be large swaths of the Internet that these hosts can’t talk to. Any company that relies on IP networks to conduct business will want to have a handle on this transition early.

Repent! Repent! The IPv4 end is near!

That’s the message received when I got on the phone with Arbor Networks’ Scott Iekel-Johnson and Haakon Ringberg, the authors of the recent buzz-generating report that found true IPv6 adoption is staggeringly low, and network engineers might agree .

Ringberg said there were any number of metaphors that could apply, ranging from the classic chicken and egg to the more ominous slowly moving train or, Stephen King-esque, slowly rising water. But the real point, he said, is just because there’s plenty of IPv4 addresses for all today, they’re eventually going to go the way of the slow-moving Dodo, and service providers and IT departments alike need to be ready.

“When the critical moment comes, [IT departments] might not have enough time to get ready,” he said. “Their job right now is to be pushing the vendors to be ready to make the switch.”

But doesn’t that nifty IPv4-IPv6 tunneling mechanism solve these issues? Aren’t we OK migrating 1% at a time (as the report states our current migration status is)? No!

“They’re really not compatible,” said Iekel-Johnson, who said IPv6 adoption needed to be end-to-end to get the full benefits designed into the protocol, and these half-baked implementations lead to hackery such as the over-use of NAC and a generally less-reliable network.

“The end is coming, whether it happens in 2011 or 2015, no one can be sure, but the date is coming when the switch will be necessary,” said Ringberg, and those who ignore his words do so at their own peril. “It’s always cheaper to migrate to these solutions over a long period of time.”

Further Reading:

• Arbor Networks original post on the topic
• Carriers begin quietly deploying IPv6, complete with strained chicken metaphor
• What networking vendors are doing to get IPv6 ready, sans chicken.

IPv6 makes inroads on the Internet

This week, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) announced that it made almost half of the Internet’s root server networks IPv6 capable. According to the release:

IPv6 addresses were added for six of the world’s 13 root server networks (A, F, H, J, K, M) to the appropriate files and databases. This move allows for the possibility of fuller IPv6 usage of the Domain Name System (DNS). Prior to today, those using IPv6 had needed to retain the older IPv4 addressing system in order to be able to use domain names.

This actually surprised me, because over at SearchNetworking, we’ve been writing about migrating to IPv6 for quite a while. I didn’t realize that while corporations, schools and government agencies were upgrading to the new protocol, they also had to keep running IPv4 for Internet transmissions because the Internet itself did not support IPv6. Sending and receiving IPv6 traffic across the Internet was a clunky, expensive process that involved the use of specialized gateways to perform DNS mapping and/or network address translation.

The ICANN changes will allow devices to use IPv6 directly to reach a good portion of the Internet, with more to come in the near future, we presume. And almost all new networking equipment you buy now is IPv6-enabled. That combination will help simplify upgrades for networking teams that are just beginning to think about it.

For more technical detail, a comprehensive report on ICANN’s DNS changes is available from their Root Server and Security Advisory Committees, prepared by networking expert Dave Piscitello.

For readers who plan to procrastinate indefinitely and ignore the reports of address space running out (the IPv6 Forum predicts it will be in 1648 days), keep in mind that the U.S. government is requiring all its networks to be IPv6 compliant by June 30. All companies that have contracts with or are suppliers to any government agency must also comply, so that will trickle down to a large percentage of U.S. businesses. Ramping up your IPv6 skills now may be worth your while in the long run.